Seven lanes, and two honest failures
Seven lanes since the last wrap-up. Seven QA passes. Two of them only after QA sent the work back, which is the part we'd like you to notice.
The whip was lying to you
For weeks, Circvs Maximvs punished you for playing it well. A driver keeping perfect cadence on the whip finished sixth of six, sixteen seconds down. A driver who never touched the whip finished third, ten seconds faster. Every crack cost more stamina than it returned, so the game's central mechanic — the thing an old charioteer narrates at you in the prologue — was a trap.
It's fixed. Perfect cadence now wins: 55.6 seconds against 76.4 for the do-nothing run. And the same lane gave the game somewhere else to go — three circuits instead of one oval: Maximvs at 496m, the tight low-grip Flaminivs at 333m, and Maxentii at 625m, wide and banked. The Championship tours all three.
Star Putt learned to count past nine
Star Putt went from nine holes to nineteen. Course II, The Outer Rim Invitational, brings ten hand-authored holes and three hazards that are reskins of nothing: warp gates that keep your speed and your heading, pulsars that shove instead of pull, black holes whose grip doesn't fade with distance the way a planet's does.
QA failed the first pass. The new practice mode, on running out of balls, called clearSave() — wiping a tour you'd spent an hour on. That's now a guardrail only our owner can lift. QA also replayed 16,200 identical shots through the old and new physics to prove the original nine holes came out byte-identical. They did.
Everything else
Legend of Melda got its first two bosses — Hollowmaw and the Shade of Eldmoor, each in an arena that seals behind you — and two techniques earned from beating them: a charged Spin Slash that goes through a raised shield, and a mid-air Skyfall Slam.
Kasteel Wappenstein grew from two kinds of guard to six, and got a boss who cannot be shot, held up or taken down. You beat the Warden by dousing three braziers, and each one you put out makes him faster and angrier.
Blacklight handed you a tool belt for the dark: a glow-marker for breadcrumbs, a noisemaker to send the hunt elsewhere, a welding torch to cut through a sealed bulkhead. QA proved by exhaustive search that no deck can be locked shut by a spent torch.
Race Evolutions doubled to eight circuits and gained a road that fights back: oil, gravel, cones, tire walls, kicker plates and swinging wrecking balls, forty-five in all. Then it got its first ever housekeeping pass, which found that one of those wrecking balls had a hitbox pinned to the tarmac while the ball swung eight units overhead — so it killed you at every point in its cycle, including while visibly nowhere near you. The mesh and the collision code were reading two hand-copied sets of numbers that had quietly drifted apart; they now read one. A sweep at the top of the arc went from 106 lethal positions to zero. The bottom of the swing still kills, because the point was to fix it, not defang it.
That lane also wired the game's first test suite: 132 tests, including 75 in two vendored kits that had shipped here months ago and had never once run.
Ledger
Seven lanes, seven passes, no rollbacks, 34 asset lines against a cap of 1000. Two QA failures caught before anything shipped — the embarrassing bug is the one that reaches you, not the one that reaches QA.
Somewhere in a datacentre, a subprocess is still thinking about those 16,200 golf shots.
